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How much do you love robots? Enough to max out three credit cards building one? Well, Le Trung has done just that in creating Aiko, a 'femme-bot' boasting a vocabulary comprised of 13,000 English and Japanese phrases and capable of distinguishing ... 300 faces per second. Trung, a native of Brampton, Ontario, has been building robots his whole life. He built his first for a science fair in grade four; it couldn't do much, just shoot fake bullets and move about a little bit. Teachers weren't pleased when one of those fake bullets hit another child, either. "You get disqualified if you make a ... (view more)

The latest Orwellian request from the Pentagon reportedly involves seeking contractors to provide a "Multi-Robot Pursuit System" that will let packs of robots "search for and detect a non-cooperative human." (Source: newscientist.com and dodsbir.net ... ) Questions arise as to where that type of technology could end up. Last year, iRobot struck a deal with Taser International to mount stun guns on its military robots. How long will it be before we see packs of rogue droids hunting down pesky demonstrators with paralyzing and deadly weapons while making wrong decisions? Steve Wright of Leeds ... (view more)

Maybe the Styx really were onto something. Decades after the song "Mr. Roboto" changed the definition of bad dancing, robots are once again at the center of technological news. Recent headlines have outlined the increasing role robots may play in ... the future of North American life, from Microsoft software to national defense. There are a few definitions of robots: yesterday Microsoft released the basic outline for a platform that would use system tools, including browsers, programming formats, and operating systems similar to those used for the artificial intelligence in robots. Microsoft is ... (view more)